William Sloane Coffin dies, ran the first training programs for the Peace Corps

Coffin was approached by Sargent Shriver in 1961 to run the first training programs for the Peace Corps. Coffin took up the task and took a temporary leave from Yale, working to develop a rigorous training program modeled on Outward Bound and supervising the building of a training camp in Puerto Rico.

William Sloane Coffin Jr., 81, a Presbyterian clergyman and former Yale University chaplain whose early activism against the Vietnam War brought him international notoriety during a lifelong career of civil disobedience, died April 12 at his home in Strafford, Vt. He had congestive heart failure.

From the moment in 1958 when Mr. Coffin roared onto Yale's campus atop his motorcycle, he signaled that his presence would mean a distinctly radical approach to the social, political and moral upheaval that defined the next decade.

Mr. Coffin called himself a "Christian revolutionary" and believed that his outspoken activism sprang from the principles of his faith.

His 18-year tenure at Yale encompassed the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam War, each of which he confronted in bold and daring fashion.

He was arrested in Alabama in 1961 while participating in the interracial Freedom Riders movement that challenged segregationist laws. He was later arrested in Baltimore and St. Augustine, Fla.

While his protests against racial segregation made news, his activities as a vocal and compelling critic of the war in Vietnam made him a celebrity. As early as 1965, he was convinced that the U.S. military presence in Vietnam was illegal and immoral.

"It's true that we're fighting Communists," he said at the time. "But it is more profound to say that we have been intervening in another country's civil war. The war is being waged with unbelievable cruelty and in a fashion so out of character with American instincts of decency that it is seriously undermining them."

Mr. Coffin offered men who refused to obey the draft the sanctuary of his Yale chapel in New Haven, Conn., an act that ushered one of the country's leading institutions of higher education into the debate about the war.

On Oct. 16, 1967, Mr. Coffin and Dr. Benjamin Spock led a demonstration in Boston at which nearly 1,000 men handed over draft cards. After the rally, dubbed "Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority," Mr. Coffin helped present the draft cards to the Justice Department.

He, Spock and others were subsequently convicted of conspiracy to aid and abet disobedience of the Selective Service Act. The charges were overturned or dropped during the next few years. He also had a hand in retrieving three released U.S. prisoners of war in Hanoi in September 1972.

After resigning from Yale, he took up ministerial duties at New York's interdenominational Riverside Church, whose gothic facade masked a progressive reputation.

He spoke out on issues including the environment, poverty and homelessness. He championed the termination of NATO and the dismantling of nuclear arms, saying, "We have to be meek or there will be no one to inherit the earth."

In 1979, he was one of four prominent clergymen allowed by the new hard-line regime in Iran to visit Americans taken hostage from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. He visited the hostages in December, singing carols and praying, and then returned to the United States to criticize the nation's "past sins" in Iran. This brought him much vilification for being soft on the mullahs ruling the Iran.

A handful at Riverside Church believed his globe-trotting and social advocacy commitments distracted from his pastoral and administrative duties, but Mr. Coffin saw no conflict.

"Every minister is given two roles: the priestly and the prophetic," he said. "The prophetic role is the disturber of the peace, to bring the minister himself, the congregation and entire social order under some judgment. If one plays a prophetic role, it's going to mitigate against his priestly role. There are going to be those who will hate him."

Mr. Coffin, the son of a prosperous furniture store executive, was born in Manhattan, N.Y., on June 1, 1924. After his father's sudden death in 1933, he moved with his mother to California and later attended the private Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.

Musically gifted, he studied piano with French composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger and briefly attended Yale's music school before serving in the Army during World War II. Because of his proficiency with languages, he was a liaison officer with the French and Soviet armies.

At the end of the war, he took part in the forced repatriation of tens of thousands of supposed Soviet "traitors" who did not want to return to Stalin's rule. Part of the Allied powers' wartime agreement with Stalin, Operation Keelhaul took the refugees back east by boxcar. Many were beaten in transit and were assured years in the Gulag.

A pivotal moment in his life, he later wrote in his memoir "Once to Every Man," was an invitation to a party among the refugees, who were unaware that they were being returned to Soviet control.

"Several times I turned to the commandant sitting next to me" to tip him off, he wrote. "Yet I couldn't bring myself to do it."

When dawn broke and the refugees realized where they were being taken, Mr. Coffin witnessed a series of suicide attempts; one man rammed his head into a glass window and began sawing to cut his jugular vein. The scenes implanted a lifelong burden on his conscience and led him, after finishing his Yale degree in 1947, to join the Central Intelligence Agency as a means to oppose Stalin.

An uncle had been president of Union Theological Seminary in New York, but Mr. Coffin until this time largely spoke of himself as a cynic and viewed church doctrine as irrelevant to contemporary life. This changed after he heard Reinhold Niebuhr and other theologians speak at the seminary.

In 1956, Mr. Coffin received a bachelor of divinity degree from Yale's divinity school and held chaplaincies at the Phillips Academy and Williams College in Massachusetts.

Early on at Yale, he led students on social service projects in Africa and became involved in Peace Corps training.

He left Riverside Church in 1987 and served several years as president of Sane/Freeze, an antinuclear group in Washington. He settled in Vermont, which became his home base as he continued to write and lecture worldwide.

A former Yale student, cartoonist Garry Trudeau, caricatured Mr. Coffin as a long-running, ultraliberal character -- the Rev. Scot Sloan -- in his "Doonesbury" strip.

Trudeau once said of Coffin: "Without him, the very air would have lost its charge. With him, we were changed forever."

His first marriages were to Eva Rubinstein, the daughter of pianist Arthur Rubinstein; and Harriet Gibney. Both ended in divorce.

A son from his first marriage, Alexander Coffin, died in a car accident in 1983.

Survivors include his third wife, Virginia Wilson "Randy" Coffin of Strafford; two children from his first marriage, David Coffin of Gloucester, Mass., and Amy Coffin of Oakland, Calif.; two stepchildren, Wil Tidman of San Francisco and Jessica Scull of Strafford; a brother; a sister; and seven grandchildren.

When this story was posted in April 2006, this was on the front page of PCOL:

PCOL readership increases 100%Monthly readership on "Peace Corps Online" has increased in the past twelve months to 350,000 visitors - over eleven thousand every day - a 100% increase since this time last year. Thanks again, RPCVs and Friends of the Peace Corps, for making PCOL your source of information for the Peace Corps community. And thanks for supporting the Peace Corps Library and History of the Peace Corps. Stay tuned, the best is yet to come.

History of the Peace CorpsPCOL is proud to announce that Phase One of the "History of the Peace Corps" is now available online. This installment includes over 5,000 pages of primary source documents from the archives of the Peace Corps including every issue of "Peace Corps News," "Peace Corps Times," "Peace Corps Volunteer," "Action Update," and every annual report of the Peace Corps to Congress since 1961. "Ask Not" is an ongoing project. Read how you can help.

PC announces new program in CambodiaDirector Vasquez and Cambodia's Deputy Chief of Mission Meng Eang Nay announced a historic new partnership between the Peace Corps and the Kingdom of Cambodia that will bring volunteers to this Southeast Asian country for the first time. Under King Norodom Sihamoni and Prime Minister Hun Sen, Cambodia has welcomed new partnerships with the U.S. government and other U.S. organizations.

Peace Corps suspends program in BangladeshPeace Corps Director Gaddi H. Vasquez announced the suspension of the Peace Corps program in Bangladesh on March 15. The safety and security of volunteers is the number one priority of the Peace Corps. Therefore, all Peace Corps volunteers serving in Bangladesh have safely left the country. More than 280 Peace Corps volunteers have served in Bangladesh since the program opened in November 1998. Latest: What other newspapers say.

March 1, 1961: Keeping Kennedy's PromiseOn March 1, 1961, President John F. Kennedy issues Executive Order #10924, establishing the Peace Corps as a new agency: "Life in the Peace Corps will not be easy. There will be no salary and allowances will be at a level sufficient only to maintain health and meet basic needs. Men and women will be expected to work and live alongside the nationals of the country in which they are stationed--doing the same work, eating the same food, talking the same language. But if the life will not be easy, it will be rich and satisfying. For every young American who participates in the Peace Corps--who works in a foreign land--will know that he or she is sharing in the great common task of bringing to man that decent way of life which is the foundation of freedom and a condition of peace. "

Paid Vacations in the Third World?Retired diplomat Peter Rice has written a letter to the Wall Street Journal stating that Peace Corps "is really just a U.S. government program for paid vacations in the Third World." Director Vasquez has responded that "the small stipend volunteers receive during their two years of service is more than returned in the understanding fostered in communities throughout the world and here at home." What do RPCVs think?

RPCV admits to abuse while in Peace CorpsTimothy Ronald Obert has pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a minor in Costa Rica while serving there as a Peace Corps volunteer. "The Peace Corps has a zero tolerance policy for misconduct that violates the law or standards of conduct established by the Peace Corps," said Peace Corps Director Gaddi H. Vasquez. Could inadequate screening have been partly to blame? Mr. Obert's resume, which he had submitted to the Peace Corps in support of his application to become a Peace Corps Volunteer, showed that he had repeatedly sought and obtained positions working with underprivileged children. Read what RPCVs have to say about this case.

Why blurring the lines puts PCVs in dangerWhen the National Call to Service legislation was amended to include Peace Corps in December of 2002, this country had not yet invaded Iraq and was not in prolonged military engagement in the Middle East, as it is now. Read the story of how one volunteer spent three years in captivity from 1976 to 1980 as the hostage of a insurrection group in Colombia in Joanne Marie Roll's op-ed on why this legislation may put soldier/PCVs in the same kind of danger. Latest: Read the ongoing dialog on the subject.

Friends of the Peace Corps 170,000 strong170,000 is a very special number for the RPCV community - it's the number of Volunteers who have served in the Peace Corps since 1961. It's also a number that is very special to us because March is the first month since our founding in January, 2001 that our readership has exceeded 170,000. And while we know that not everyone who comes to this site is an RPCV, they are all "Friends of the Peace Corps." Thanks everybody for making PCOL your source of news for the Returned Volunteer community.

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Story Source: Washington Post

This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; Obituaries; Staff; Training

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